[Sca-cooks] 100 Mile Feasts

[Sharon Gordon]

One of the things that the groups working to increase local food availability have done is to create 100 Mile Diet Challenges.  To participate people try to get most of their food from within 100 miles of the target location.
http://www.100milediet.org

Generally people commit to participating at 
25%, 50%, 75%, and 95% of their food intake being from within the 100 miles.

Two ways that I think would be fun to participate in a challenge like this within the SCA food opportunities would be:

1) Try to source as much food for a feast within 100 miles of the event and/or the main cook for the event.  If the feast is already designed to feature food that is in season during the time of the event, this would make things easier.  And having some members grow part of the produce for the event would help too.

Price issues would likely affect how much of this could be done, but local SCA-gardeners could make it more doable.

2) Have a putluck meal where people are asked to bring a dish from within 100 miles of a particular (probably European, maybe other European contact) location with a specified time period.  

For groups with more experience, the season could be chosen as well and the food would be tastier if the historic season matched the potluck meal's location.  So if you wanted to do Spring in France in the 1500s, it would help if it were also spring in your Kingdom at the time of the meal.

For extra fun, people could plan these far enough in advance that the cooks could have a chance to preserve local foods to match the state they would have been in during that season.  So if you were making a winter dish, you might have dried some local cherries, grapes, or plums in the summer to have for that winter dish.


Either of these could help with giving a more period feel to events by helping the local resources use to more closely mirror the historic local resources.  I do realize that to some degree a 100 mile radius could be historically extravagant and that 10 miles might more closely represent a radius for an average historic market day.  And I could be off on the historic radius as I haven't researched it.  I am just thinking about descriptions of people walking/riding  in with a cart /wagon of produce, participating in the market and going back home that day or the next.

What other kind of events or projects do you think would be fun to do with this concept?

Sharon
gordonse at one.net